2014-2015, 23 episodes. Famous writer Richard Castle continues to work
with NYPD homicide detective Kate Beckett, though by this point it's
fairly clear that he didn't come here for the hunting.

Season 6 ended on a cliffhanger: Castle was on the way to his
wedding with Beckett, when he was run off the road and disappeared.
That had to be resolved first, and it was turned into an intermittent
subplot for much of the rest of the season. Why did he vanish, why did
he reappear with his memory wiped, and why does everyone he finds say
that he told them not to help him find out the truth?

This is basically a procedural show, solving the crime of the week,
and by the time procedural shows have got into their seventh season
they're usually pretty well-worn, dropping in the ratings, and looking
for gimmicks. And there are certainly some of those here: Castle goes
undercover in a class of seven-year-olds; Castle finds himself in a
parallel universe; Castle is pushed out of the precinct and works as a
private investigator; there's a murder in a Mars surface simulator, or
on a dude ranch, or on an airliner in flight. What the show manages to
do well, though, is to keep a sense of humour about the tricks it's
playing: Castle has grown up a bit since the early episodes, but he
still has a sense of "what fun" about having to wear a space suit or
dress up as a cowboy, of having enough of the child still in him to
appreciate the opportunities that the adult now has.

Apart from the trappings, the crimes are pretty routine, though with
this many episodes it's hard not to repeat one's tricks at least a
little. The cast continues to be solid: Nathan Fillion, the reason I
started watching in the first place, has made the role thoroughly his
own, and while Stana Katic has a somewhat limited range of emotive
expressions she does a reasonable job too. Really, if those two
weren't working for me, I wouldn't be watching any more.

This season doesn't end with a cliffhanger, but with a proper
endpoint: one that allows the story to go on, certainly, but the sort
of thing one would expect from a show where renewal was in some doubt
and the writers didn't want to leave the fans hanging in case of
cancellation. But in fact ratings were solid all through the season,
and by the time this episode was being made the eighth season was
pretty much in the bag; it was confirmed shortly before broadcast.